Margo Ellis, News Editor
In the office of journalism professor Alan Miller, boxes of newspapers and well-loved books crowd the shelves. Awards, plaques, and framed pictures of Miller’s many friends and family are tucked between coffee mugs and posters of long-passed events.
“If I have to move,” Miller said, glancing behind him to the shelves above. “I don’t know what I’ll do with this stuff.”
Miller, who will retire in May, has taught journalism classes at Denison since 1999, when he began teaching an introductory news reporting course in the communication department. A native of Orrville, Miller was thrust into the world of reporting earlier than most.
“I grew up in a house where my dad was a newspaper reporter and photographer, and my mom wrote an Erma Bombeck-style column for the local weekly newspaper, so I was surrounded by journalists without even realizing what that was or what it meant,” Miller said.
Shadowing his father’s work from a young age, Miller got his first camera at 5 years old, and had his photos published by the time he was 7.
“I’d go along with him because my mom said, ‘Hey, I have to go to the store. You have to watch Alan,’” Miller said. “And so I’d go along with him to these things, and I just thought, ‘This is the coolest thing ever. I would love to do this.’”
By the time he was in high school and old enough to drive, Miller began sleeping next to a police scanner with a pair of pants rolled into boots at the end of his bed.
“In the middle of the night, if the Orrville Fire Department was called out to a fire or a crash, or the police were called to some big thing, I could jump into my boots, pull up my pants, throw on a shirt and a coat, jump in the car and race off to wherever things were burning or blowing up,” Miller said.
Armed with his camera, Miller would take pictures of these events, rush home to develop the film, and drive to the local newspaper office to slide his photos— with captions, of course— underneath the office door, hoping the newspaper would use them.
“And by God, they did,” Miller said, smiling. “And it was like a drug. I just couldn’t get enough of it… I felt validated that I was doing the kind of work that was important to the community, and the newspaper would see it as high enough quality to use it.”
After attending Ohio University and graduating with a bachelor’s of science in journalism and dreams of becoming a foreign correspondent, Miller got an internship in Bonn, Germany. He then returned to the U.S., got engaged to his wife, Kris, and began working back home in Orrville as the editor of the Orrville Courier Crescent and bureau chief of the Wooster Daily Record.
On top of editing the paper, Miller’s duties at the Orrville Courier Crescent were abundant.
“I also did a lot of photography, and laid out the paper. All of that,” Miller said. “I even delivered some of the papers, because I’ve always felt like local journalism is so important to the community. It’s both a calling and a public service. That’s how I feel about it, and that’s how I’ve always approached it.”
“But after two years of that, I thought it was going to kill me— all those hours and pots of coffee,” Miller said. He left his hometown for a job at the Canton Repository, then got a position as the Newark and Licking County Reporter at The Columbus Dispatch.
Miller and his wife moved to Newark, and soon bought an old Victorian-style home that they spent seven years fixing up.
After two years as the Newark and Licking County reporter, the Dispatch offered Miller a position at the city desk on general assignment, covering the city of Columbus.
“But I [was] thinking, ‘Oh my God, we just bought this house.’ And so I started driving to Columbus,” Miller said. “I ended up doing that for 35 years, because at one point, I said to Kris, ‘Could we please get closer to Columbus?’ And she said, ‘Sure.’ So we got in the car, we headed toward Columbus, we got to Granville, and she says, ‘This is far enough!’”
By 1999, Miller was the state editor, editing stories from reporters in the position he had originally been hired to. At that time, all of the mail that came to the Dispatch from outside Columbus was sent to the state desk.
“This letter arrives from Denison University and says, essentially, ‘To whom it concerns, we’re looking for somebody to teach an intro to journalism class,’” Miller said.
Several years earlier, Miller had returned to Ohio University and earned a master’s degree in journalism. He’d just finished his degree by the time the letter from Denison crossed his desk, and he decided to apply. When he was hired, there were no other journalism classes taught at Denison.
Due to his first course’s success, Miller began teaching an advanced journalism course soon after. He kept teaching, became the executive editor of The Dispatch, served as the faculty advisor of The Denisonian, and in 2021, helped create what is now Denison’s journalism department.
“In January 2022, I retired from The Dispatch, and two weeks later I was teaching full time here,” Miller said. “And enjoying every minute of it.”
As a full-time professor, Miller helped facilitate the creation of The Reporting Project, a nonprofit news organization run out of Denison that covers Licking County. He was also part of the team that hired The Reporting Project’s managing editor, Julia Lerner, in 2023.
Lerner, who has known Miller for years, grew up just a few houses down from his home in Granville.
“When I was in high school, my parents were like, ‘You should go talk to Mr. Miller. He knows about journalism.’ Which is an understatement, because at the time, he was the executive editor of the Columbus Dispatch,” Lerner said.
Lerner said that Miller is a fantastic resource for both students and for other journalism faculty, calling him a “wealth of knowledge.”
“What Alan has taught me is that even as the medium and the format of journalism changes, the process doesn’t. We’re still storytellers,” Lerner said. “We have so much we can learn from him, even if it’s just, you know, the word is ‘across,’ not ‘accrossed.’”
While she said she’ll miss his mentorship after retirement, Lerner also said she’s excited for him to have the chance to spend time at his family farm and fix up his old motorcycles. “He’s been working with a camera or a pen in his hand for the last 60 years. If anyone deserves a break, it’s him,” she said.
One of Miller’s students, Katie Corner ‘26, said that she credits some of her success as a journalism major to Miller’s guidance and teaching. Corner recently received the President’s Medal in recognition of her time and achievements at Denison.
As Corner’s advisor for a summer research project, Miller guided her through the process of a new, intense level of reporting.
“It was a really long process, and it was a lot of research. It was unlike any form of journalism I’d ever done, but his guidance throughout that project was so impactful to my learning,” Corner said. “He gave me incredible feedback… and because of his help, parts of my research ended up being published in The Reporting Project, and then throughout that summer, a couple other stories ended up in The Dispatch, and the Newark Advocate, so I credit all of that to his guidance.”
Corner also emphasized how much Miller will be missed by students like her. “It’s devastating to me to think that future journalism students won’t get to have him,” she said. “Because I just think he’s such a warm presence and such a key part of our department. I think the way he connects with students on a personal level, not just as a professor, is what makes him so special to me… He really, deeply cares about students, beyond the classroom.”
Miller intends to spend his retirement continuing to work for The Reporting Project, while also working on his family farm in Ohio’s Amish country. He’ll also continue writing his monthly column in the Dispatch, “Old House Handyman,” through which he has been chronicling his time working on old houses since 1992. He said that he never would have imagined that his life would have taken the path it did, but that he’s incredibly grateful.
“I feel like it was a gift that fell into my lap when I was first given the opportunity to apply for a job here all those years ago. And then, what it has become is beyond my wildest dreams, that I’m sitting here today as both a journalist and a teacher. It’s been quite a gift,” Miller said.